As economic uncertainty dominated headlines, Bank of America saw an opportunity to provide trusted, real-time financial insights through social media. The Social Newsroom was launched to quickly translate complex data into engaging, credible content — delivered within 12 hours. By leveraging organic social formats like polls, quizzes, and expert videos, the brand positioned itself as a go-to financial resource. The campaign reached 3.6 million people, increased engagement by 24 percent, and boosted interactions by 45 percent, demonstrating the power of responsive, social-first content.
The economy has surged into a daily trending topic on social media. Across the news, alarming buzzwords paired with conflicting and confusing insights have made following the economy closely more essential than ever.
As an institution, Bank of America has established authority in tracking the economy and providing industry-leading research. However, its social presence had not previously been focused on guiding users through real-time economic uncertainty. This was due to the challenge of creating social content at the speed of the market. But as demand grew, the brand decided it needed to provide trusted, eye-level content to empower the consumer to feel more in control of their daily finances.
Bank of America's solution transformed the use of social from branded marketing to economic journalism, leveraging the trusted expertise of the Bank. The brand set a goal of distilling in-depth information into user-friendly data visualization via social without sacrificing credibility or over sensationalizing.
Real-Time Social Opportunities is a dynamic workstream in place for a year and a half. With this, Bank of America noticed that to deliver content quickly, traditional methods of content creation wouldn't be sufficient. The brand needed to create an entirely different layout, timeline and order to meet this demand.
To accomplish its goal, the brand established The Social Newsroom: a proprietary, live workshop able to quickly spot the latest economic news, mine reputable data, and distill it into an always-on stream of social-first reporting. Week to week, Bank of America combs through the latest reports and surveys, keeps watch over breaking headlines and leans into trending topics to become a strategic, real-time, data-heavy news source its followers can depend on. With this, the brand found a way to relay content in a social-first, digestible manner and pitch, create, and post — usually within 12 hours or less.
Bank of America focused on reaching Americans who are struggling to keep up with the financial jargon and give them active, engaging help with their own financial situation. Content is directed at all consumers, not just customers.
Within every piece of content, Bank of America homed in on a key data point and provided a fresh financial perspective backed by its economic expertise. From static posts to carousels and short-form videos, the brand shared data in a sophisticated, visually appealing way that caught users' attention in-feed. This content stream was thumb-stopping, unique and, most importantly, credibly sourced and useful.
The goal was to be at the forefront of conversations on social platforms. Because of this, content from Real-Time Social Opportunities was placed intentionally on different platforms. Knowing awareness was a key objective, Bank of America was on channels that not only drove results in terms of views but sparked conversation among the target audience. The brand used channel-based technology to bring the latest social trending formats to life, including but not limited to engaging elements such as polls, quizzes, quotes, and videos from economists. What's more, the campaign included no paid media and was exclusively organic.
The Real Time Social Opportunities campaign reached 3.6 million people, demonstrating that Bank of America is considered a financial resource via the timely economic updates, insights, and explanations. Driving 24 percent increase in engagement, this content proved to be shareworthy and trustworthy amongst users and their social networks and communities. By joining in on the financial conversation in a timely manner, Bank of America observed higher engagement opportunities (up by 45 percent). Overall, the campaign accomplished its goal of increasing financial awareness, brand awareness, and engagement. These metrics also signaled a shift in how marketing channels can grow with more responsive content to consumers' ever-changing needs and mindsets.
